What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

I'd forgotten that PDC piggy backed onto those services (as far as ITV were concerned), so some form of ancillary teletext service had to remain to allow it to work, even if it was just the clock cracker page !

Only the regions served by the Leeds playout centre and Westcountry ever had a full dynamic PDC service I think (like the one BBC and C4 provided)

Which ITV companies, if any, had a local news bulletin at closedown, in the style that BBC1 Wales used to do?

I know that UTV had one.

I think tsw and before that westward had a shipping forecast before closedown.

Grampian also had a news bulletin at closedown.



...and an example from UTV.

Didn't Grampian essentially play out their epilogue when the rest of the country were putting out their local news bulletins? A very curious decision, but I'm sure they had good reason to do things that way.

Not an epilogue if its not at the end of course.

That goes for epilogues in general, some had them some didn't and there were presumably reasons why. The same for the national anthem at closedown. I remember reading about an advertiser that refused to advertise on Granada because they didn't play the anthem

Ulster in the above did neither, which is understandable in their circumstance

True enough, which is why I said "essentially".

That advertiser must have either been local, or was restricting themselves to quite a small area of the country, as the larger companies (certainly by the 1980s) mostly didn't bother (Granada, Central, YTV, Thames didn't (and I bet the only reason LWT did was because Thames didn't), that's most of the country, and I don't believe Border or the aforementioned UTV did either).

I used to like YTV's dour "that's yer lot" mentality towards closedowns.they did generally go to some trouble but I remember one night in around 1982 where a Hammer film ended around 12:15 and they cut directly from their ident still to the clock, where Paul Lally simply said "and so we come to the end of tonight's programmes, goodnight" and faded to black just before the clock got round to 12:15. And that was it. Presumably a union /overtime thing.

Yes IIRC it was a local pie or meat manufacturer... or something equally as stereotypically northern!

I wonder if the BBC Wales bulletin was there because of the need to do a local closedown each night to play the Welsh anthem, somebody figured they might at well tag on a news bulletin read by the announcer out of vision?

Ulster Television, still under the leadership of the Henderson family, did play GStQ at closedown right up until going 24-hour; using a similar film than other ITV regional companies, and not deviating like Grampian showing a Scotland flag or HTV Wales playing "Hen Wylad Fy Nhadau".

It was only after Brum Henderson retired in 1990 that it adopted the UTV branding and more explicitly targeted its audience south (and west!) of the Border.

Ulster Television was still the official name until 1993 when their new franchise period commenced, they changed their name to UTV and in June 1993 kicked off the full rebrand, including the opening of their new extension to Havelock House in Belfast with their new

Studio 1.